Things are as bad and as good as they seem. Sometimes nowadays someone will tell me about somehting tragic or upsetting, and I will experience a wave of emotion wash over me, and then I will move on. This is actually quite good for me. It used to be that I would repress emotions of sadness or grief, often having them convert to anger. One of the things I was afraid of was losing my happiness. If I give in to the grief, I unconsciously thought, then I will never escape. I must not even acknowledge it. How much better it is to experience it genuinely and then move on. I notice that the elderly talk about death and in less reverent tones than the young, excluding those young who have seen a lot of death. An elderly person will often say simply "So and so has died" and then already be talking about something else one minute later. I think this is healthy. Death is a fact of life. Sadness is appropriate at the loss of a good friend, but there is no point, no obligation either, to grieve continuously. I think many of the elderly have learned this lesson, probably the hard way. As their friends and family continue to die, death becomes much more of a familiar entity, unworthy of extensive comment. Now, I am not espousing a fatalisitic view here. I am not saying everyone dies, so what's the point in living? I am saying, everyone dies, so what's the point in grieving. In a sense my view is exactly the opposite of the fatalistic interpretation. Finally, it should be said that it is not desirable or possible to completely eliminate grief. When a person close to you dies, it is completely natural to experience a large amount of grief. Trying to stop this emotional floodtide is not what I advocate at all. I do advocate not clinging to it. Experience these emotions but there's no need to prevent them from leaving when the time comes.
The other side of the coin is pleasurable experience. The first thing that comes to mind here is drinking alcohol. I used to drink a beer, experience a mild euphoric buzz, and then down as many beers as I could after that in an effort to maintain that euphoric buzz. The nature of the euphoria was such that this strategy always failed, and I would end up throwing up into a toilet the next day. (Hopefully I made it to a toilet.) I was trying to experience joy and cling tenaciously to it. How much better it is to experience joy when it naturally occurs, and let it pass peacefully on its way when the time comes.
3 comments:
Death begins before death. Spiritual death is the result of a contagion, I guess. And then there's hope.
Everything contains the seeds of its own destruction. The nature of reality is that things change. Nothing is permanent. And the big news is: That's okay. Absolutely nothing is wrong with that.
I've had a spiritual death, or at least sickness, myself. Part of the recovery and hope is the idea that we can live peacefully with the world as it is, and not the way we wish it to be.
I empathize. I too have often desperately avoided negative feelings about myself or situation, as if acknowledging the negative would somehow defeat me. Instead, I drank too much as well, thinking that constant happiness and even euphoria were owed me. Many things suffered from this and I did not see clearly.
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